What is the hypergrid?

The hypergrid is an extension to opensim that allows you to link your opensim to other opensims on the internet, and that supports seamless agent transfers among those opensims. It can be used both in standalone mode and in grid mode. The hypergrid is effectively supporting the emergence of a Web of virtual worlds.

The basic idea for the hypergrid is that region/grid administrations can place hyperlinks on their map to hypergrided regions run by others. Once those hyperlinks are established, users interact with those regions in exactly the same way as they interact with local regions. Specifically, users can choose to teleport there. Once the user reaches the region behind the hyperlink, she is automatically interacting with a different virtual world without having to logout from the world where she came from, and while still having access to her inventory.

The hypergrid started as a external project, but it is now included in the standard distribution of OpenSimulator. To run your OpenSimulator instance in hypergrid mode, please see Installing and Running Hypergrid.

The first example is the Hypergrid address of a region named "keynote 1" on the grid at "cc.opensimulator.org" whose login port is 8002. The grid address and login port are often the same that one would use to login to a local account on a grid (e.g. the equivalent loginuri for this example would be http://cc.opensimulator.org:8002).

The second example gives only the hg-address and port. In this case, the destination region is the default region setup for that grid, as specified in the [GridService] section of bin/Robust.HG.ini (for grid) or bin/config-include/StandaloneCommon.ini (for standalones).

One common way to teleport to an HG address is to paste the address into the map find box of the virtual environment viewer. A Hypergrid enabled If the source grid is Hypergrid enabled, it will find the remote hg address and bring it up as a map tile which one can then teleport to.

Firestorm also has a "hop" protocol which can be used in its address bar. For this, the "hop" schema is added to a Hypergrid address. For example